Chile presidency a battle between daughters tied together forever by the Pinochet years

Chile is fascinated at the prospect of Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Matthei,
once childhood friends who found themselves on opposite sides during the
Pinochet regime, duelling for the country's presidency.

They were childhood playmates who went to the same school; their families not only lived across the road from one another but were also enduring friends.

Then, in the political turmoil that followed General Augusto Pinochet's military coup, their fathers found themselves on opposite sides – one effectively tortured to death by the junta in which the other was a senior figure.

Now Chile is fascinated at the prospect that the two little girls, seen apparently happily together in a grainy black-and-white photograph that is circulating on the country's social media, are about to go head to head against one another in the most public of contests – as the two leading candidates in this autumn's presidential election.

Michelle Bachelet, now 61, is the Left-leaning former president who stepped down after her first term in office with sky-high approval ratings, and is seizing her first chance under Chile's constitution to run for that post again.

Michelle's father, Alberto Bachelet, died in 1974, six months after the coup the previous year, having never recovered from the detention and torture to which he was subjected.

Evelyn Matthei, 59, is the unexpected candidate of the Right-wing coalition that is currently in power, after the man expected to run for president stepped aside, suffering from depression.

Her own father, Fernando Matthei, held a senior role at the military academy in whose basement his former friend was detained and abused – and last week a crusading human rights lawyer launched a renewed attempt to bring charges against him over the death of Bachelet, for which many say he should be blamed.

Mr Matthei insists he has nothing to fear. "My conscience is absolutely clear," said the 88-year-old, speaking to The Sunday Telegraph from his home in Santiago, the Chilean capital. "It's in the hands of the justice system. But I know I conducted myself well. I have full confidence that I will not be held responsible for the death of my friend Alberto."

Fernando Matthei.

However the controversy, combined with the intensely personal nature of the presidential election to come, has Chile agog. It has put the spotlight once again on one of the ugliest periods of the country's nearly 200-year history, and sparked huge interest in the story of how the two families became so fatefully entwined.

It was in 1958 that Captain Fernando Matthei, then 32, moved into a house on the single residential street of Cerro Moreno airbase, a military encampment in the desert 900 miles north of Santiago. With him was his family - his wife, Elda Fornet, and their three children, Fernando, six; Evelyn, four; and Roberto, aged one.

Another family moved into the house opposite: Captain Alberto Bachelet, 34, with his wife Angela Jeria and their two children Alberto, 11, and Michelle, six.

Alberto Bachelet.

The two men were of different characters: Mr Matthei, of German descent, was reserved, cultured and disciplined, while Bachelet was a charismatic extrovert who organised parties for the families on the base and gathered people together for bingo nights. But they grew close, united by a shared love of classical music and a fascination for politics and philosophy.

Meanwhile, their daughters became friends.

"There weren't many people on the base – it wasn't in the town, it was out in the desert," Ms Jeria told The Telegraph. "Michelle and Evelyn played together, and their fathers were close friends."

Ms Jeria recalled how Michelle would roam the base with Evelyn; the two young girls would run around together or ride their bikes along the sandy streets. The young Michelle called her friend's father "Uncle Fernando". To Evelyn, Bachelet was "Uncle Beto".

By the mid-1960s both families were living back in the capital, with houses in the neighbouring, exclusive districts that sweep upwards towards the Andes.

The Bachelets' home was surrounded by olive trees, which were much admired by Mr Matthei. So when Mr Matthei built his own home nearby, Bachelet presented him with two olive trees and a flowering cherry. The trees were planted in front of the living room of the house, where Evelyn Matthei lives to this day.

Bachelet's widow still lives in the same district, in a flat that he purchased in the 1970s, naming Mr Matthei as the legal guardian of the property in case of his absence.

By now their daughters had drifted apart. Ms Bachelet studied to be a paediatrician, while Ms Matthei began a business and finance degree, working part time for the banking company of Sebastián Piñera – the billionaire who is Chile's current president and who is now supporting her own attempt to win power.

But their fathers, both air force generals, would meet inside the ministry of defence to discuss life and politics, though they often had friendly disagreements.

Mr Matthei, a rising star in the military, had lived in bases around the world, and was impressed by the Swedish system. "We had a very different political outlook," he said. "I voted for secular, Left-leaning parties. I liked the Swedish social democratic model.

"But Beto (Alberto) liked the style of Cuba. I couldn't agree with that – those Castros, sitting there for 60 years, running the country like their own private kingdom? Telling me I couldn't buy this book, or speak to that person? It was a totally unacceptable concept to me."

In 1971 Mr Matthei was sent to Britain, to work alongside 74 Squadron at the now-defunct RAF West Raynham in Norfolk.

Back in Chile, Salvador Allende had just been elected president, putting the Left into power, to the dismay of many within the military. Bachelet – by now head of the air force's finance division – was asked to work in a senior role preventing black marketeering and hoarding of scarce basic goods.

But in 1973 Gustavo Leigh, the head of the air force, forced Bachelet to step down from his post. On September 11 came the coup orchestrated by Gen Pinochet, and Bachelet realised that he had been deliberately removed from the circle of senior officers that was plotting against Allende.

That very night he was detained, and from then on was repeatedly released, then held again, and tortured. His health deteriorated, and in a letter to his son Alberto, who lived in Australia, he wrote: "I was detained incommunicado for 26 days. I was subjected to torture for 30 hours and finally sent to the Air Force Hospital. They destroyed me inside; they were exhausting me mentally."

Three months after the coup, Mr Matthei had returned from Norfolk to be made head of the Academy of Aerial Warfare. "It would have been a dream posting in normal times," he wrote in his autobiography Matthei: My testimony.

But it was in the underground chambers of that same academy that Bachelet was being detained and abused. Mr Matthei claims he raised his friend's treatment with Leigh, the air force head who was the most vicious of Pinochet's four-man junta.

"He told me not to get involved in issues which were none of my business," said Mr Matthei in 2009. Reflecting on the fate of his friend, he added: "I confess that I never went to see him in the basement of the academy, nor in prison; something which I am ashamed of. Perhaps on that occasion prudence superseded courage."

Bachelet's heart could not cope with the stress he had endured and he died in March, 1974. Meanwhile his daughter Michelle and her mother Angela Jeria were taken to the infamous Villa Grimaldi detention centre, where they too were tortured, before being forced into exile in East Germany.

Four years later, Mr Matthei became a fully fledged member of the junta after replacing Leigh as head of the air force, and at his insistence the following year Pinochet allowed the surviving Bachelet family to return.

Evelyn Matthai greets supporters. (LUIS HIDLAGO/AP)

In an emotional meeting soon after, Mr Matthei confessed to Ms Jeria his anguish at the death of her husband.

She recalled in a recent interview that Mr Matthei told her: "You have no idea how many times I sit in the garden of my house, beneath the two olive trees that Beto helped me to plant, and I talk to him and ask him his advice."

Fernando Matthai, right, with Pinochet, 2nd right.

Decades passed, and in 1988 the junta disbanded, with Pinochet voted out of office. The two daughters who had once been such friends embarked on their political careers in the new democratic era; Ms Bachelet on the Left, Ms Matthei on the Right.

Ms Bachelet became Chile's first female president in 2006, leaving office four years later with an approval rating of 84 per cent, to move to New York to run the United Nations' women's department.

Last year Eduardo Contreras, a human rights lawyer who had previously pursued cases against Pinochet, tried to bring Mr Matthei to trial over the death of Bachelet. The case never proceeded, however, and remarkably Ms Jeria defended Mr Matthei against the accusation.

"General Matthei has always been a friend of ours," she said. "I respect him enormously and I am certain that he wasn't in the War Academy at the time my husband was held there."

Ms Jeria's daughter can hardly have expected to be confronting the woman whose father is accused of her father's death, when she ran again for the Chilean presidency.

But Mr Matthei, at least, is sure of what he thinks of the situation – and of his daughter.

"I'm very proud of her," he said. "This nonsense about bringing charges against me does not bother her one bit.

"I read a lot about military history, and am a great admirer of the British military. I know how a soldier should and should not behave, and I conducted myself well at all times.

"I taught my daughter the importance of dignity, and of flying solo without getting distracted.

"But it is amazing that these two girls are now both running for the presidency."